The Mindful Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)—Mindfulness at Scale

Abstract

The Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance massive online open course (MOOC) was developed at Monash University and is hosted on the FutureLearn platform. Mindfulness programs are generally taught within the intimate, face-to-face interaction between students and teachers so there are challenges in translating them to the online medium where there is a lack of direct and immediate interaction between learner and teacher. We attempted to deal with these challenges in a number of ways. For example, having an expert and motivated development team, anticipating and pre-empting possible learners’ concerns and challenges, cultivating a safe and respectful learning environment, using discussion forums skilfully mentored every day by experienced mindfulness trainers, helping learners to move at their own pace, and bringing learners and teachers together through the production of weekly feedback videos. That these challenges have been successfully met is borne out by the popularity of the course and the feedback from learners. We have gathered extensive data demonstrating that the course significantly increases mindfulness and work or study engagement, and reduces stress as measured with validated rating scales. It has been heartening to observe how transformative Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance has been, but also been surprising to observe how well a discipline such as mindfulness can translate into an online learning model. This chapter will describe the principles, development and implementation of this successful online course.